Chapter 4
"Derrick." Her voice was controlled now.
Quiet.
More frightening than when she had shouted.
"I need you to stand up and come back to the altar with me."
He didn't move.
"Now," she said.
"Vanessa." He looked up at her from where he crouched.
"This is my mother."
"I can see that."
"She walked three days to get here."
"That is not my problem." The words came out before she could decide whether to say them.
The room went very still.
Even Gerald closed his eyes briefly.
Celestine said nothing.
She simply looked at Vanessa with an expression that held no anger.
Only a deep, settled kind of recognition — the look of a woman who had already survived things this girl could not imagine.
Derrick stood up slowly.
"What did you just say?"
"I said—" Vanessa stopped.
She recalibrated.
"I said this is not the time or the place.
We can talk about all of this after the ceremony.
Your mother can wait in a side room, she can have something to eat, I'll have someone look after her—"
"You want to put her in a side room."
"Derrick, be reasonable."
"She is not going in a side room."
Vanessa's jaw tightened.
She glanced at her father, who gave her the smallest nod.
She looked back at Derrick.
"Then explain to me," she said carefully, "why you never told me she was alive."
The room moved in a way that had nothing to do with anyone standing up.
It was a shift in the air.
A collective intake of breath across three hundred people.
Derrick went very still.
Because that was the question.
The real one.
The one underneath everything else happening in this room.
He had told Vanessa his mother passed away four years ago.
Celestine looked up at her son.
She had not known that.
The pain that crossed her face was not dramatic.
It was quiet, and it was worse for being quiet.
"Derrick," she said.
Just his name.
May you like
Just that.
He couldn't look at her.
